This was a mixed day working on my project In Passing; tweaking photographis, printing for my revised book dummy, which I now have all of the photographic prints in the straight black & white mode to start the sequencing and pairing design process.

I have also finished linking up all of my previous posts about In Passing and Bad Trip – Sad Trip (the original project title) on this blog to the In Passing Catagory on the side-bar as well as ensuring that the previous posts had tags assigned.

I have now converted my second edition Blurb version of In Passing to private and it is no longer for sale, thus the Blurb book is now a very slick book dummy. Photographs have the wrong hue, but hopefully it gets the intent across.

I have identified a couple of folks who I think I would like to approach to write an essay for the new book as well as a corporate sponsor to pitch this book to. So I think I need to lock down at least one assay in conjunction with the revised book dummy before I make my corporate funding pitch.

I am pretty sure who I can pitch the book to for publication and I may have the publishing agreement completed by the begining of September. So my intent would be for publication next Spring. hmmmm, might be do-able.

This past weekend, we made a very long weekend out of it, driving up from Southern California to Portland. Enroute on Interstate-5, I made a mental note of the absence of roadside memorials in California and the plethora of them as we crossed the border into Oregon. Initially I intended to make note of them, but once I start making mental notes, I found myself actively composing and thinking of how the Oregon landscape is different from the previous work and yes, I start making images.

During this project, I have stopped to make detailed compositions and I have also made drive-by photographs, where the blur of the landscape creates images that are more akin to a transitory memory. On this trip, the most abstract image to date (below) is now so abstract that it loses most of the direct meaning, while simultaneously embodying the most interpretative narrative. So this image below has me on the fence. If I had any concerns about the validity of the image, that was dispelled when I returned home to find my copy of Susan Burnstine’s new book “Within Shadows”. The key difference is that Burnstine’s entire book is developed around similar images with the same consistent style, while I have just this one and it appears out of sorts with the others.

But I sense that I am back in the mode of working actively on this project again, so I will see what else develops, as I may end up with a whole collection of similar abstract images. So as a result, I now have added Oregon to the places that I found these memorials and next maybe what I find will on my trip to North Carolina later this month.